Be Original

Well I thought of sharing few things with you all which I had in my mind since long. This is a bit long post, so if you are not patient enough, you can leave reading right away.

So if you are still with me, here is a question to you...

What does it take to make a good photograph?

Camera ? Lens ? Photoshop skills ? Art ? Creativity? Money ?

So even though all the above applies, the most important answers are efforts and passion.

Well photography is not a hobby for us but a passion. If it’s just a hobby you do it when you get time, but if it’s a passion, then you do it no matter what comes your way, whether you get time or not, you always take out time for photography.

So let me just put some more thoughts on the efforts part. I do my regular software job with its never ending deadlines. So what does a software guy do when he returns home? Spend time with family, watch TV or listen to music, have dinner, if there is some work pending, then do it on the laptop and sleep. What I do? Well when I return home, I spend some time with family, have lovely dinner which my mummy and wife prepares and then straightaway go to my room and spend time on my laptop processing pictures. There are still 6 GB + photos of mine, which are still to be processed and I am unable to do that as I hardly get time. I browse internet and learn new processing techniques, apply that on my photos. So I end up staying awake till 1 or 2 am almost daily. So I get insufficient sleep which I know is not good for health. Anyways, next day I go to office with the same enthusiasm and whenever I get time, I upload the photos. My colleagues say “Damn! You get lot of time to do all this”. But god damn, they don’t know how much effort I have taken to do all this when they were sleeping peacefully. So efforts cannot be measured by anyone else. It’s only you, who know how much effort you have taken to achieve something.

Let me put some more thoughts on passion. Weekend comes up and like everyone else I am also pumped up. What does a normal guy do to enjoy on weekends?

Go to pub, party and drink? Meet friends? Outing? Or just sleep on the couch and watch movies on DVD? Well, what I do is plan to meet my photographer friends who are equally passionate about photography like me. Sometimes we wake up at 3 or 4 AM in the morning and leave to nearby beautiful places to capture the early morning mist/fog and capture that lovely morning. We capture the amazing people from different places in natural way. You almost sleep on the ground to get a very low level to get a unique angle. In the process, you hurt your knees and back as you completely forgot the way you stressed it while clicking. Then we plan for the next outing and we return home. So again the hard work of processing the photos begins for days to come. Every passionate photographer does sacrifice lot of things to get that beautiful capture.

Now that you know how much efforts goes by in capturing the photos.

What will you feel when you see someone else steal your photos and put it on his page as his own?

The answer is you cannot relate in any way what actually it feels when that happens to your photos. Only the person who has taken all the efforts to make that photograph, knows what it really means.

As youngsters in colleges, we don’t see anything wrong when we copy assignments or programs from others. But problem arises, when such youngsters feel that this is the way to get things done. They start developing the philosophy which is called “Easy way out”. Such people always want instant recognition without any hard work. So when they see photography pages, blogs and websites, instead of trying to achieve that effect, they know the easy way out, which is to download the image and crop the image and remove the watermark and upload it as their own photo. They start getting likes and good comments which motivates them further to create their own page with all such stolen photos. Such false acclaim is not going to last for long. Problem is that such youngsters don’t even realize that stealing photos is crime and they can be punished in court.

I have faced such situations many times in past, where my photos were stolen and used in pages, websites, travel websites. Many people used it without my permission. Some cropped it and used. No credits given to me. Well, if someone asks me to share my photos for their blogs, I would be more than happy to do so. But guys, at least show some courtesy to take permission from the creators.

Here I would like to share the plight of my friend “Anis Shaikh” who is a very talented photographer. But he has not developed his talent overnight. It has taken lots and lots of efforts on his part to be where he is today. It requires immense hard work and creativity to make your photo stand out which he is doing since a long time. But one random college going youngster decides to create his photography page and uses all stolen photos of different photographers. Lots of Anis’s photos are also stolen and used there. After action from Anis, facebook has removed the page and its content. But you will find such guys everywhere. You don’t even know who is stealing your photos and what they do with it.

So my sincere request to all the youngsters “Be original. Be yourself”. It’s good to get inspired from someone’s work. Try to emulate what he/she has done. Internet is the best teacher. Try to learn all aspects of photography. But never ever steal anyone’s work as it is the hard work and the efforts that you are stealing from that person which was never yours in the first place. Its like stealing a child from the photographer.

Do share this with your friends to make them aware that photography is an art to capture and not an art to steal.